John Taylor

Originally from Des Moines, where he was born in 1952, John Taylor has lived in Europe since 1975--first in Germany, then in Greece, and in France beginning in 1977. His first collections of short prose ("The Presence of Things Past", "Mysteries of the Body and the Mind", "The World as It Is") draw on the author's childhood and adult experiences in Iowa and Idaho. The late French film director, Louis Malle, summed up Taylor's "Presence of Things Past" as "charming evocations of a Midwestern childhood". As for "Some Sort of Joy", this "odd travelogue and oblique self-investigation" (as the critic Jeremy Alden puts it) offers unusual insights into the daily life of an "average" medium-sized French town. "The Apocalypse Tapestries" combines prose and poetry, and is inspired by the famous tapestries in the Chateau of Angers. Taylor's "If Night is Falling," returns to his Des Moines childhood. "The Dark Brightness," "Grassy Stairways," "Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees," and "What Comes from the Night" are poetry collections. His three-volume "Paths to Contemporary French Literature" introduces over a hundred and fifty French authors to English readers, often for the first time. He has also written "Into the Heart of European Poetry" and "A Little Tour through European Poetry". He has also translated the work of several Greek, Italian and French writers, including Elias Papadimitrakopoulos, Elias Petropoulos, Veroniki Dalakoura, Lorenzo Calogero, Alfredo de Palchi, Franca Mancinelli, José-Flore Tappy, Charline Lambert, Béatrice Douvre, Georges Perros, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Louis Calaferte, Jacques Dupin, Pierre Voélin, Catherine Colomb, and Philippe Jaccottet. Taylor lives near Angers, in the Lower Loire Valley.